Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday February 07, 2012 @07:26PM
from the higgs-hulking-out dept.

ananyo writes "Today the two main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator, submitted the results of their latest analyses. The new papers (here here and here) boost the case for December's announcement of a possible Higgs signal. Physicists working on the In the case of the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment, have been able to look at another possible kind of Higgs decay, and that allows them to boost their Higgs signal from 2.5 sigma to 3.1 sigma. Taken together with data from the other detector, ATLAS, Higgs' overall signal now unofficially stands at about 4.3 sigma."

Don't worry. The higgs exists. If it doesn't they will fabricate it. They have to because if they don't then they might have to finally reveal the truth.

That we've actually been secretly using the Black Mesa Lambda Complex dark fusion reactor to slingshot our teleport signals via a Xen relay in order to hide our illicit entanglement research from both the Nihilanth and the Combine? Pfft, everybody knows that. What you should be asking is, how come the Portal Storms and the Seven Hour War happened after Gordon and the G-Man gained control of the border world. Hmm?

Certainty ? from a scientific point of view ? infinite!
Sigmas in a way tells how probable is to get these results, the more sigmas you have means that the more improbable to get these results without invoking some other model/theory etc etc. So 4.3 is good but not good enough, we need at least 5 sigmas.
(What said is not 100% correct, but a rough explanation)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_deviation [wikipedia.org]

To be pedantic, it's a measure of the probability that random chance caused these results. A 4.3 sigma result means that if you just fed white noise into the sensors, you would get a result this strong 0.001% of the time - or to put it another way, if you run the test 100,000 times with absolutely no real signal, one of them will probably have a result this good.

The important distinction is that this is not a measure of "how likely we are right". There is a 1 in 100,000 chance that random luck caused this result, but there is also an unknown and hard to quantify possibility that our theory is wrong and some other mechanism caused this result.

4.3 sigma corresponds to a confidence level of 99,998292% (credit to Wolfram|alpha). This is about as certain as death and taxes if compared to “everyday” events, but maybe it's not enough for theoretical physicists (I'm not one).

All this is under pure mathematician's "null-hypothesis" assumptions. That is, we have a 99.999999999% confidence level of being right, unless we are making any mistake in our set of thousands of assumptions, there is any miscalibration, any fundamental error, systematic errors,...

But this is not a mathematical exercise. It is a physics experiment. Knowing how the CMS/ATLAS collaboration works and how politized it is, If there is a (subtle but likely) mistake, then this number means nothing.

The correct reading would be: "we are 99.99999999% (or whatever) sure that if we are wrong it is not due to a purely random statistic fluctuation"

Other than that 5-sigma is a mere convention on when to trigger a press conference to declare "discovery"

Well, of course he meant American football. If he'd meant un-American football he wouldn't have referred to a "field", he'd have referred to a "pitch", or a "winkie", or whatever term y'all use for that sort of thing.

The term football actually comes from the fact that the players were standing and running around on their feet, rather than riding a horse (as the nobility played polo.) Sometimes I like to call cricket football, but no-one seems to get the reference.

These talks come with very loose transcripts. Here's the key passage at length as I shamelessly promote Taleb's upcoming book Antifragility [fooledbyrandomness.com], through I'm already certain I only agree with two-thirds of what he is putting forth (emphasis mine):

It's because of convexity effects, because small probability is very convex to error. [] Take the Gaussian distribution. And actually in a separate paper I finally proved something that has taken me three years. Take a very thin-tailed distribution such as the Gaussian. Thin-tailed, the normal distribution. You have two inputs, one of which is standard deviation. Standard deviation is very much your error. Now, if you take a remote event, say, 6, 7, 8 sigmas, you increase the standard deviation away from the mean; you increase the sigma by 10%, the probability of that is multiplied by several thousand, several million, several billion, several trillions. So, what you have, you have nonlinearity of remote events to sigma, to the standard deviation of the distribution. And that, in fact if you have uncertainty, the smallest uncertainty you have in the estimation of the standard deviation, the higher the small probability becomes and at the same time, the bigger the mistake you are going to have about the small probability. So, in other words, most of the uncertainty in parameterizing the model, most of the tails. So, you take an event like Fukushima, you see, where they said it should happen every million years; you perturbate probabilities a little bit and one in a million becomes one in thirty. Or the financial crisis. Or anything.

He sounds like the kind of person who is well on he way to making a functioning "improbabilty drive" (HHTTG) - He just needs to cut back a little on the caffeine and find a way of using the Brownian motion in a spare cup of coffee as a source of true randomness.

"Just because something has an exceedingly small probability of not happening, is no guarantee that it won't happen."

Some time ago, there a was a small-town church that held an annual throw-six-dice competition for charity. Pay for some throws, throw

I left my statistics degree in my other pants... is 4.3 sigma a good thing? How many sigmas is "certainty"?

It's not good enough. They've got a good way to go before they achieve Six Sigma.

To make that goal, these scientists should probably go on a retreat, spend some time on team building exercises, and practice dynamic solution strategies, so that they can build up the synergies they need to deliver agile, customer-facing world class results that deliver a genuine Six Sigma experience.

To make that goal, these scientists should probably go on a retreat, spend some time on team building exercises, and practice dynamic solution strategies, so that they can build up the synergies they need to deliver agile, customer-facing world class results that deliver a genuine Six Sigma experience.

To make that goal, these scientists should probably go on a retreat, spend some time on team building exercises, and practice dynamic solution strategies, so that they can build up the synergies they need to deliver agile, customer-facing world class results that deliver a genuine Six Sigma experience.

A customer-facing giant accelerated relativistic particle ray, eh? I like the cut of your jib!

Apparently, the superbowl coin toss "experiment" has generated nearly as large a statistical anomaly...

Not really, because that was only "predicted" after it occurred. That's cheating. In other words, if you sift through millions of events discarding all the "likely" ones (such as coin tosses in other sports, or regular season NFL games, that didn't show any consistency), it is extremely likely you'll eventually find an "unlikely" one.

In contrast, the criteria for detecting the Higgs Boson were set ahead of time.

Apparently, the superbowl coin toss "experiment" has generated nearly as large a statistical anomaly...

Not really, because that was only "predicted" after it occurred. That's cheating. In other words, if you sift through millions of events discarding all the "likely" ones (such as coin tosses in other sports, or regular season NFL games, that didn't show any consistency), it is extremely likely you'll eventually find an "unlikely" one.

In contrast, the criteria for detecting the Higgs Boson were set ahead of time.

Not entirely, because there was no specific prediction for the mass. There were upper and lower mass limits on the Higgs set by theory, but not an actual prediction. So, if you scan a mass histogram looking for a bump and then find one, you can't simply ask how many sigma it is above the background and translate that to a 99.99... whatever percent probability. That's why they're hoping for a five or six sigma signal before they say anything conclusive, despite the fact that four sigma is well above 99% p

Hmm, in an ideal world, a reported sigma value should include those types of considerations. (Basically, factoring in how many different hypothesis were tested.) It can be tricky, but you would expect such high-profile science to be top notch. After all, to determine you need 5 or 6 sigmas to exceed 99% probability (which is really just an inconsistent usage of terminology), you still have to perform the same calculation. (Otherwise, how do they know they don't need, say, 8 sigmas in the way they're cal

Hmm, in an ideal world, a reported sigma value should include those types of considerations. (Basically, factoring in how many different hypothesis were tested.) It can be tricky, but you would expect such high-profile science to be top notch.

It is high profile science, but these "sigma" numbers are in informal way of reporting the size of the signal. In the final paper, they'll report masses and production rates with proper error bars, taking into account all statistical factors. The final published paper won't say "Hey, we have a six sigma signal!", it will say the mass of the Higgs is xxx ± yyy GeV/c^2, etc., and a mass histogram will also be shown, as well as information on the mass window searched, etc.

They say it is impossible on how to bias a coin to one side or another (the centre of gravity would only move closer to one side or another). One commenter posts a way of tossing a coin even if such a bias were possible (using HT vs TH).

Dear God. I'll make Sean Carrol a deal: I will never again talk in public about physics, as long as he agrees never again to talk in public about statistics. The sheer badness of that post makes my head want to go all splodey.

This is only the first step. What the data suggests is that there's probably a particle there -- however, the higgs has several important properties that are impossible to measure with this dataset yet -- like its spin0 property. Chances are though, that because of how this data fits in with the higgs predicted mass, it really is the higgs.

An excellent point. Note that there are two other channels that will indicate the spin 0 property. Those signals are so small compared to the background that it will be a few years before that issue is resolved.

I am frankly shocked that you can say something like this.
Of course it's a loss. But just because the results are not immediately applicable to anything does not mean it's worthless. This kind of research increases our knowledge of how the universe works, and that in and of itself is definitely worth publicly funding. We are increasing the sum of human knowledge. There is almost nothing more important.

I think we can say we have discovered the "God Particle" or there's about a 1 in 16400 chance that they are right. I think It's a great chance that the standard model is "IT". Lets work from that and go forward for now unless I loose that bet.

Then there is this little thing called the world-wide-web invented by this guy Tim Burners-Lee to enable Particle Physics working at CERN to better collaborate.

Do these spin-offs count to CERN or Particle Physics net economic worth?

No, I really don't think they do. At least they shouldn't where science is concerned.

If you set out to do X, and pour millions of dollars into doing X, but in the end you fail at doing X, even if in the process you end up doing Y, it is still the case that doing X in itself was not a sensible goal. You would have been better and cheaper to just sit down and do Y from the beginning.

We might as well say that gathering giant multi-story piles of $10 banknotes into heaps and burning them is a worthwhile economi

you didn't understand. these are things that were developed while studying exotic particles, for the study of exotic particles. anyway, if you have a lot of money, feel free to give it to the research you think matters, and let people decide in a hundred years if you were right or not.

And yet, without the un-economical research that lead to those things, we wouldn't have them. The danger of letting the bean counters run the world is that we confine ourselves to mostly producing yet another X At that, X is most often an entirely un-necessary consumer product of minimal quality.

The synchrotron came into existence as an 'atom smasher' to probe particle physics. The synchrotron radiation we find so useful these days was actually an undesirable but unavoidable loss of energy. One day, we rea

The argument against direct economic benefits from modern high energy physics is stronger than you think. All the examples you give are for particles that had clearly measurable signatures in the 1930s. The Higgs and other particles that might be detected for the first time in the 21st century have such incredibly tiny effects on our world that we haven't been able to measure them despite looking diligently for a long time (40 years since the publication of the standard model). We can indeed engineer w

Now that is funny, since the Higgs field has huge effects on our world and the universe as a whole. Ridiculous to attempt a prediction of time scale from when knowledge of a particle's "signature" will lead to engineering application. What was the time span from Madam Curie's work to commercial nuclear power?

What was the time span from Madam Curie's work to commercial nuclear power?

About 50 years, depending on how you calculate it. Radium isolated by the Curies in 1906. First commercial power plant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Origins) in Russia in 1954.

But note that the key theoretical idea, the fission chain reaction, surfaced via Szilard as early as 1933, and Fermi's reactor was 1941. So from the first glimmerings of a practical nuclear fission theory to a practical demonstration was less than a decade!

No, there is more to physics than theoretical high energy physics. We have solid state physics (solar cell design falls in there), geophysics, fluid flow....plenty of emerging energy sources covered by ongoing developments in physics.

How many millions of euro of taxpayer money have gone into this project, which will interest only a handful of scientists?

Approximately $9B, over 15 years, split between 20 nations. So on average, about $30M/year per country. Compared to Iraq or Afghanistan, that's a rounding error. Whatever may or may not come out of the Large Hadron Collider, I rather doubt either of those wars is going to show any ROI.

I bet they said the same thing about electrons, protons, and neutrons several decades ago. The positron is also an important particle in positron emission tomography, which has certainly saved lives. The research that went into the production of these facilities has also yielded very useful things, such as particle counting and cryogenics (neither of which was invented by particle physicists but certainly vastly improved upon by them).

Oh yeah, and the world wide web [wikipedia.org] was invented at CERN, so I guess that was kind of important too...

It's hard to see this search for the Higgs as anything other than a net economic loss. No work on exotic particles (that is, anything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon that we've known for a century) has ever produced any useful technology...

People receiving pion radiation therapy would disagree, I think. How about muon imaging of geological and man-made structures? Neutrino imaging of the Earth? There you have three particles (or more depending on how you count the neutrinos) being used for practical purposes that you leave out.

It's hard to see this search for the Higgs as anything other than a net economic loss. No work on exotic particles (that is, anything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon that we've known for a century) has ever produced any useful technology...

People receiving pion radiation therapy would disagree, I think. How about muon imaging of geological and man-made structures? Neutrino imaging of the Earth? There you have three particles (or more depending on how you count the neutrinos) being used for practical purposes that you leave out.

One could have said the same thing about what Farrady found about electromagnetism, that the economic benefit wasn't much. The practical application of the higgs field we can only guess at now, but being able to dick about with the mass/inertia of matter for instance would have truly epic applications. This is about as insightful as saying in 1825 that electricity might be able to be used to make stuff move. Look how that technological revolution turned out.

It may not be very useful but it could equally well be the opposite. However from any particular point in history you can pretty much trace the current state of technological civilization back to some discovery at some point. I seem to notice a correlation between the effort in the discovery and how it transformed everything.

The higgs is a big deal for the future of mankind, if you don't immediately understand that it's kind of difficult to explain why.

... No work on exotic particles (that is, anything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon that we've known for a century) has ever produced any useful technology....

Neutron discovered in 1932. 2012-1932 = 80 years. Not a century yet. Positrons and pions are both important for medical use, muons and neutrinos are powerful tools for imaging the Earth. So you fail on a number of counts.

Normally, when dotters take to correcting a post en mass, there isn't a reason to cover anything; however, the logic of, "We got these things 25-50 years later from a theory, but anything that doesn't contribute this quarter is a waste of money," would be sufficient to kill the theory of economic value versus investment. We got lots of things from the money dumped on the Space Race and the succeeding era, but from a dollar in to dollar out that month, year or even decade perspective, it wouldn't have appeared to be that affordable, even though those technologies, from fuel cells (more than just one type), to photovoltaics, to advanced ceramics and plastics, account for more economic profit today than the most expensive year of the US Independent Space Exploration Era.

I, however, wanted to plug, in a non-spammy way, a couple of places on YouTube that shows current payoff. While it doesn't focus on the LHC, it's a follow up on technologies that are otherwise related to what is being done at the LHC.

http://www.youtube.com/user/BackstageScience?feature=g-all-s#p/u/43/12KaFItjgl0 [youtube.com]This is YT Channel BackstageScience, with a feature call for the video titled, "Lap of a Synchotron". In this video (as well as the many in that list), you will find discussion about many of the assists to, primarily, materials science that comes from the many research activities in the beamline branches.

Synchotrons are relatively expensive, and when they were the new thing, they were more expensive to construct, maintain and run than many infrastructure projects; they were the LHC of their time. Now, we have safer planes, improved medicine and more advanced super- and semi-conductors. Intentionally producing nanoparticles has been a relatively new thing for commercial industries, but that new economy is entirely dependent on technology like the synchotron.

BackstageScience has a video titled,:"Muon Man", which is an interview with one of the scientists in general. If you asked someone 25 years ago what practical applications existed for muons, you would have been told they can be used to detect time dilation in accordance to Special relativity or changes in a protons charge field. Today, we use the to detect restricted radio-active materials and peer into the inner workings of large-scale geological activities, which will eventually allows us to detect volcanic eruptions and, quite possibly, earth quakes.

With regard to this specific project, the LHC's job is to understand the fundamental structures of energy at very small scales. The idea it's stuck on the Higgs boson research shows a lot of ignorance, but the kind one might expect from the limited understanding that comes from someone who would say, "[A]nything other than the proton, neutron, electron and photon," is exotic or has never produced any useful technology. E^2=M^2C^4+P^2C^2 has brought us anti-matter, which eventually led to improved medical technologies. The fact is, large projects, like the LHC, are necessary for such advancements, but too expensive for even a single portion of the economic spectrum to manage for the initial time between theory and application. To say it was too expensive because you can't see any advantage in it shows a failure of understanding how doctorates lead to economic and social advantages. Perhaps you should join slashdot with the moniker Lysenko, so, we will all know how ignorant you are about the importance of advancing science through large scale. publicly funded projects.

That's because you're a fucktard. I suspect concepts like zero and water being yet cause you the same degree of consternation. Here's my advice to you. Just start jamming pencils into your eyes until the feelings go away.

Using sigmas in science has been around for a long long time. It's something from probability mathematics. You see, the scientists don't consider anything, and I mean ANYTHING, including your own existence to be 100%. However, they will allow for probabilities approaching the point where there really isn't much reason to try and argue about it. (If you hear a scientist say something is 100% probable, then he's just dumbing the explanation down so he doesn't have to do an entire publicity tour for years just

Reading some of the papers, it is clear that the data is being selectively interpreted to yield a desired conclusion. This is yet another case of continued government funding depending on making progress in proving a particular result, in this case, the existence of the Higgs particle.

Reading your post, it is clear that the article is being selectively interpreted to yield a contentious opinion. This is yet another case of trolling.

Your the househusband of a competent physicist and you cannot figure out how to create an account?

"It's kind of like seeing the debris flying out of where a house stood after a gas explosion, and from the patterns of flying bricks and timbers, being able to determine what the house looked like, as well as what make of toaster caused the explosion! "

You mean they are alike because in both cases, if you are wrong there is no way to prove it, so we just have to take your word for it that that is how it happene

You mean they are alike because in both cases, if you are wrong there is no way to prove it, so we just have to take your word for it that that is how it happened? (I mean, your "wife's" word, of course.)

So... because you're not smart enough/too lazy to take the time to understand any of the field (100 to 1 says you don't even have a BSC in physics) it must be bad science?

So... you are smart, but you read everything I wrote and come away with a completely different interpretation because you made numerous assumptions? I never said it was bad science. I posed a question. You are assuming that I was assuming the second part of the clause was true. The OP could have easily responded back something to the effect of: I see your point. They aren't so alike after all. You may have a BSC in physics, but you could certainly use some work on your logical thought processes.